Stories (2011)

  I smiled. "No way, baby. I still won't die for you."

  "No," she gasped, and took my arm. "You miss my drift. It's the pain I need, not just the watching. I can't live through them, can't feel it in me. Don't you see, it would be the ultimate."

  I looked at her, wondering did I have it right.

  "Do you love me?"

  "I do," I said.

  "To know that I would spend the last of my life with you, that my last memories would be the pleasure of your face, the feelings of pain, the excitement, the thrill, the terror."

  Then I understood, and understood good. Right there in the car I grabbed her, took her by the throat and cracked her head up against the windshield, pressed her back, choked, released, choked, made it linger. By this time I was quite a pro. She coughed, choked, smiled. Her eyes swung from fear to love. God it was wonderful and beautiful and the finest experience we had ever shared.

  When she finally lay still there in the seat, I was trembling, happier than I had ever been. Gloria looked fine, her eyes rolled up, her lips stretched in a rictus smile.

  I kept her like that at my place for days, kept her in my bed until the neighbors started to complain about the smell.

  I've been talking to this guy and he's got some ideas. Says he thinks I'm one of the future generation, and the fact of that scares him all to hell. A social mutation, he says. Man's primitive nature at the height of the primal scream.

  Dog shit, we're all the same, so don't look at me like I'm some kind of freak. What does he do come Monday night? He's watching the football game, or the races or boxing matches, waiting for a car to overturn or for some guy to be carried out of the ring with nothing but mush left for brains. Oh yeah, he and I are similar, quite alike. You see, it's in us all. A low-pitch melody not often heard, but there just the same. In me it peaks and thuds, like drums and brass and strings.

  Don't fear it. Let it go. Give it the beat and amplify. I tell you it's love of the finest kind.

  So I've said my piece and I'll just add this: when they fasten my arms and ankles down and tighten the cap, I hope I feel the pain and delight in it before my brain sizzles to bacon, and may I smell the frying of my very own flesh. . . .

  THE JUNKYARD

  Where I grew up there were lots of junkyards along the highway. This was before Ladybird Johnson insisted (and probably with good reason) that all junkyards be contained behind fences, and that wildflowers be planted over the entire state of Texas—well, at least along the highways.

  My dad was a mechanic, and as a child I often rode with him out to junkyards to buy parts.

  Back then, something broke on a car you had to fix it, or replace it, usually with a used part.

  There's less and less of that these days. It's actually cheaper to just throw a broken part away and put in a new one than to fix it, and besides, most parts now, like ballpoint pens, can't be fixed.

  In these junkyards car parts weren't the only things you saw. There were overturned washers, smoking tires and burning mattresses. This was because when someone bought some junk he wanted from someone who was tossing it out, he often had to buy the whole pile. Meaning then he had to get rid of the stuff he didn't want. Like tires and mattresses.

  Sometimes in these junkyards people lived with this mess around them, and to be honest, growing up, a lot of people I knew who didn't run junkyards looked like they lived in one. I seemed to circulate amongst folks with at least one overturned and grass-surrounded washing machine in the yard. Or a car wheel buried in the weeds so that you could bang your ankles on it.

  I remember one junkyard trip in particular, though I'm sure since I was a very young child I've made more of it than there was. Way I remember there was this big place full of all manner of junk and a skulking dog that seemed to just want you to turn your back for a moment. I was with my dad, however, so I wasn't overly afraid.

  And before I go farther, let me say something about my dad. I know this doesn't fit in exactly, but since this is my book, I don't give a shit. I'm going to talk about my dad, Bud Lansdale. He was, and is, my hero. He wasn't a perfect man. He was flawed like all of us, but he was bigger than life and had about him a sort of Old Testament sense of justice, though not being able to read he had never read the Bible, and to the best of my knowledge had about as much interest in it as a pig does machinery.

  My dad was born in 1909 and grew up during the Depression. He made money from hard work and sometimes from traveling town to town to battle in what would now be called Tough Man Contests, or the original Ultimate Fighting Contests. These events primarily took place at fairs back then.

  He had a knowledge of boxing and wrestling and had the opportunity to do both professionally, but had to help take care of his father's family. My dad's mother died when he was eight. I don't know which number wife this was for my grandfather Lansdale, but by all accounts he was an asshole who married several times, once to a stepdaughter. He beat my father with a whip when he was a child of eight or nine and made him pick cotton. The scars were visible on my dad's back, like razor cuts. I think it's interesting that my father never so much as spanked me. He was known to raise his voice, but he never spanked me. I can't say the same about myself and my children. I have spanked. Not beaten, but spanked. I don't regret doing it. I think it was the only way to accomplish immediate punishment, and warnings to not do things that could do greater damage to them than a spanking. But my dad never spanked me, and my brother who was seventeen years older was only spanked once for chasing a fire engine.

  My mother didn't believe in spanking, though she once lost her cool when I was about eleven and whipped my ass severely with a fly swatter. This was a whipping I not only remember, but deserved. My mother and I laughed about this until the day she died. Which goes to prove spanking isn't necessarily the thing that turns a child to drugs, animal mutilation and voting Republican.

  My father believed in spanking, he just never did it. He couldn't bring himself to do it. One look from him was enough. I hated to disappoint my father because I admired him so much. He was honest to a fault, a guy with a Puritan work ethic. Kind as he was to us, he could be violent.

  Never improperly, I thought. But he didn't beat around the bush when violence raised its head.

  Perhaps my first real memory of my father was him giving me a dog I named Blackie and my dad called Honkeytonk because the dog had belonged to the owner of a honkeytonk just down the hill from where we lived, out by the highway. Across the highway was a drive-in theater. When I was a child my mother and I used to sit at night at the tall windows of our old rickety house, high up on that hill overlooking the honkeytonk, the highway and the drive-in theater beyond, and we'd watch whatever was on at the theater. I only remember the cartoons.

  I suppose because that's what a four-year-old would have been interested in at the time.

  We couldn't hear the drive-in, but my mother would make up stories to go with the cartoons.

  It was pretty neat. Every night we could sit at these big tall windows and watch the cartoons and mom would tell me a story. Those are really good memories.

  Maybe because my parents thought I was bored, and because I didn't have anyone to play with, my dad got me a dog. A cute black puppy that was part cocker spaniel. I adored that dog and he and I became the best of friends. More like brothers, really.

  One day, out playing, my dog crossed the creek behind our house and went into a yard where he shouldn't have been. I called him, and a man came out of the house and saw Blackie (alias Honkeytonk) digging in his flowerbeds. Blackie and the man were a good distance from me, but I remember that man looking at me and seeing I was calling my dog, and the next thing I knew he had a stick or pipe, I really don't remember, and he beat my dog over the head with it and picked up its still body and tossed it into the creek.

  My world collapsed. My best friend had just been murdered. I went screaming to my mother.

  I don't remember exactly what happened, I don't know if dad ca
me home then, or if my mother went to a neighbor's house to call him at work, because to the best of my memory we didn't have a phone.

  All I know is my dad seemed to appear. He got the dog out of the creek. The dog was alive.

  (Died at the ripe old age of 13, I might add, and his death was traumatic to me even then.)

  My dad took the dog in the house, crumbled up aspirin in water and encouraged it to drink, then, without a word, he started across the creek.

  I followed him, but he sent me back to our property, and from there I watched as he knocked on the back door of the man who had beaned a child's puppy because it was rooting in his flowerbed.

  When the man answered the door my father hit him a sharp blow, grabbed him, dragged him out of his house and somehow ended up getting hold of this guy's legs. (Remember, my dad had been a wrestler.) He dragged that fellow face first through his own flowerbed, then pulled him out to the creek and threw him in.

  Dad came home then.

  The man never bothered me or my dog again.

  Nobody sued. Nobody complained. It was over. That all happened about 1955.

  This memory, the one about the drive-in, and one about a tornado that I won't discuss here, all go along with the memory about the junkyard because they all happened in such a close proximity of time, and I was at that age when everything was crystal clear, magical, and not completely understood. I didn't even realize until I was a grown man that what my dad had done was ironic. He had treated the man as the man had treated my dog. One day, in my mid-twenties, I thought about this incident for about the millionth time, and suddenly it dawned on me what he had done, and I laughed out loud.

  Another short true story before I get back to "The Junkyard." Once, when I was in my teens, my father, who was a mechanic and owned his own garage, finished working on a car, and the lady who had left it with him wouldn't pay. My dad had seen this trick before. From her. He refused to let her have it without payment. The lady sent over her boyfriend.

  Now, at the time I was in my late teens and had been in martial arts since I was in my mid-teens, so I was slightly knowledgeable of self-defense. My dad, who looked a bit like Ernest Borgnine crossed over with the older John Wayne with a bit of pit bull and axle grease tossed in, was right at sixty. The young man who had assumed the role of Sir Galahad was probably in his late twenties, possibly mid-thirties. A stout-looking guy looking for trouble.

  He pulled up outside our shop, which was in what was then called a bad part of town, and he got out on the edge of the street and called for my dad. He called to him like he was calling up an obstreperous dog.

  Dad was in the garage, and it was a warm day, and the doors were wide open, so it was easy for my dad to stroll out to meet the fella, who then went about telling my dad how he was going to release his girlfriend's car and he had no right to hold it, and so on and so on, and how if he didn't do it he was going to beat my dad like a red-headed stepchild, etc.

  My dad listened to him, said, "You got money for the work?"

  The guy looked at my dad as if he had suddenly sky dived onto the scene, said something smartass. I don't remember what, but smartass.

  This guy was leaning on the fender of his car, and when he said his smart remark he pushed off the fender like he was about to come at my old man with his fist, and I thought, I'm going to take care of this shit head, but before I could pounce, my dad turned his shoulder and his fist came up from somewhere below his belt, maybe from as far down as hell, and he connected with said shit head's chin, and I swear to all that is truthful, I had never seen anyone hit that hard before in my life. My dad's fist making contact with this guy's chin sounded like someone had filled a balloon about the size of a beach ball with water and dropped it off a four-story building. I mean a noise like that could make pond water jump.

  My dad's blow hit this guy under the chin and lifted him off the ground and onto the hood of the car. Mr. Tough Guy slammed on the hood and rolled off on the ground and stopped rolling face up, one leg jerking like he was trying to start a motor bike, his eyes open, sightless and twitching as if they were those little designs in a slot machine. Panicked, I said, "Oh, my God, Daddy, you've killed him." And, since the guy had stopped kicking, or moving in any way, it certainly seemed that way.

  My dad looked over at the guy, watched him for a moment, as if mildly curious, reached in his shirt pocket, took out a stub of a cigar (he saved half-smoked, half-chewed stubs all over the place: pockets, ashtrays, car motors he was working on, you name it), poked it in his mouth. He took out a box of kitchen matches, removed a match, and in no particular hurry, struck the match on the side of the box and lit his cigar, said, "Naw, he'll come around."

  Dad went in the garage and went to work, and as was his custom, it wasn't long before he was whistling at his job.

  Dad was right, by the way. The fellow did come around.

  About fifteen minutes later he rolled over and got to his knees, then his feet, and wobbled off down the street, leaving his car, as well as that of his girlfriend. I don't think the guy remembered how to drive after that blow. He barely remembered how to walk.

  Never saw him again.

  I asked Daddy about a follow-up later. He said the lady paid off her car and sent some other man, who was very polite, over to get it.

  I don't want to give violence too much of a due, but you know what? I think my dad was right.

  I never saw him start a fight or pick on anyone in any way, but if you tried to hurt him, threaten him, bother his family, he went immediately to the source. This was not an unusual way then. It made for greater politeness amongst your fellow men. No lawsuits, because nobody would have thought of suing over such a thing in Texas back then, and they damn sure wouldn't have expected to win. It was part of the old adage that a man totes his own water.

  Okay. One more. One time at a filling station we stopped for gas, and a guy who owed my Daddy money came out of the filling station. He came out right after a fella whose name I won't mention, but he had EAT PUSSY tattooed on his chest (I've used this in books of mine), and he was bare-chested, of course, and he had a reputation for being so bad the sun didn't shine where he walked, and this guy with him, who's dressed up, was supposed to be badder than him.

  So this second guy, he's the guy owes my dad money and has lied about when he's going to pay for some time. My dad looks at him, and this guy who was about six two and two hundred and twenty pounds of solid meat, wearing white pants and white shoes and a white belt and this paisley shirt (this was the rage then) looks at my dad, and I'll tell you, his fucking shoes weren't any paler than his face.

  My dad said something like, "Where you been?"

  "I been meaning to get by, Bud."

  "Yeah," said my dad, who had a plug of Beech Nut chewing tobacco in his jaw about the size of a bale of hay. "Need to see you."

  "I'm going to come by."

  "You been owing me for months, and you're always going to come by."

  "I'm coming by."

  My dad spat a stream of tobacco on the guy's white shoes, and this guy didn't move, and the guy with him, he's looking off like he's found an interesting shape in the clouds.

  "I think you ought to come by today," Dad said. "Now would be good."

  "I can't today."

  Another stream of tobacco, down the pants legs this time.

  "Come by."

  "I got to go to the house and get money."

  "Good. You come by. Don't keep me waiting." Another stream of tobacco down the pants legs.

  "I'll be there."

  And he was, too.

  Sorry, I've gotten away from "The Junkyard," but this gives you some idea of the times and where I grew up. That town, for its betterment, I think, is no longer a tough ex-oil town. It's now an ex-oil town that specializes in antiques and crafts.

  I could tell you other stories about my dad. Ones about his kindness, his generosity, and one about the time he set the Lindale jail on fire, but those are f
or another time. The kind of stories I've chosen here somehow fit in with the atmosphere of the junkyards I remember from my childhood, the one I used as inspiration for this story.

  All right, let's actually talk about "The Junkyard." I look back on this story with a feeling of warmth. It may not be the first story where I began to find my voice, but I think it was a story that told me clearly that I had turned a corner. And it was the story that made me realize that the basic horror plot, though well loved by me, was apparently not for me as a writer. It was a similar revelation to when I discovered that though I loved science fiction I wasn't a writer of it.

  Not true science fiction, anyway.

  What was really different here is not that I'm finding my voice, but that I am controlling it better. I'm fighting it less. Letting it flow, though, not entirely unobstructed.

  I hope the results are entertaining pulp.

  THE PASTURE

  Five thirty-eight a.m. Less than an hour before light. Out there in the back-country darkness, great pines on either side, the red clay road winding like a reptile in the headlights, a man couldn't help but feel that he had fallen out of everyday life into a surreal land.

  That time of night had an eerie quality the same as twilight, when brilliance slid slowly off the edge of the world and darkness, like some crawling beast, inched gray then black, over the rim.

  But now there was a jigger of rose-and-gold morning mixed with the night; and perhaps that, with the heady brew of darkness whipped thick about it, was what gave the air its unnatural look and feel.

  Yes, feel, thought Lieutenant Maynard. It was as if one could reach out, hold the air, and work it between the thumb and forefinger like fine gossamer.

  The three of them had come out of sleep to the fire bell's ring. The dispatcher, a strawberry blond woman nicknamed Red, had sent them on call.

  In the depths of the pines lay a cow pasture where, according to the coon-hunter who had called it in, a small grass fire was burning. After crossing the pasture and threading through woods, he had found his pickup and driven to the nearest phone, in the town of Nacogdoches, Texas, just three miles away.